Help
for Kaiser
Permanente Patients on this public service web site.
Permission is granted to mirror if credit to the source is given and the
material is not offered for sale. The Kaiser Papers is not by Kaiser
but is ABOUT Kaiser

Kaiser
hinders access to doctors in this area as well as in Northern
California. First, callers are insulted by a time-consuming
and unnecessary request for their complete address and phone number
in addition to their name and membership number.
The receptionist can see this information on her computer screen.
Appointments
are not available for four to six weeks, and
Kaiser will not place the caller's name on a waiting list.

The
only way to obtain near-term nonemergency care is to wait and wait
at an urgent care center. David Campbell

Los
Angeles

"Access"
is only part of the difficult, circuitous route that patients
face at Kaiser. After a serious back and neck injury in 1998,
with severe pain and many neurological symptoms, I actually got to
see many specialists. However, after a while, I realized that
I was being passed from one specialist to another without ever getting
a diagnosis or substantial treatment or follow-up. Finally,
one year after the injury and a suicide attempt because of severe,
ongoing pain, I had an appointment with the Kaiser pain
management doctor, who prescribed medications to help me.

My
attempts to take Kaiser to arbitration on these matters failed due
to statute problems and arbitration limitations set by Kaiser.

Your
story on Kaiser Permanente's "in the hands of doctors" campaign
talked about internal concerns of living up to that slogan.
I was internal communications manager of KP's California division
during
that time and vividly recall the intense disdain that Kaiser's
local and regional public relations staffs had for that marketing
campaign.
The local PR folks at Kaiser, like its physicians, want to use
their limited resources to deal directly, honestly and as effectively
as possible with the overriding concern of patient access, which
remains a major issue at every Kaiser medical center. They really
resented
having to go to mandated internal PR strategy meetings
and concoct elaborate communications plans to support "in the hands
of doctors" and similar ill-conceived strategies.